I'm in a restaurant! I would obviously prefer blogging from the
train, but I was crossing London during the rush hour, so the idea
that there would be a seat, or even floor space, was obviously
fanciful.

So here I am, in the lovely surroundings of Gatwick North Terminal.
Actually, at this time in the evening it's not so bad; there are only
nine more flights on the departure board for this evening (I am choosing
not to say “nine more flights leaving this evening”, as I have counted
chickens before), so my natural misanthropy is not exercised into
overdrive: the music is only borderline intolerably loud, and my
fellow travellers are not overwhelming.

I'm on my way to Barcelona, for the tail-end of
Mobile World Congress. From
previous experience, and news reports, the sharp end of the event is
the first couple of days; certainly, when I've been before with
my company, the majority of the contacts made
and business-cards collected have been from meetings on the first
couple of days. On the other hand, when I've been before with my
company, I have emerged from the week with a skin tone the colour of
my suit, a hacking cough that took months to subside, and a deep
desire to hide away from everything in a darkened room.

There are a number of things that make MWC unsuited to the introvert,
particularly the introvert exhibitor (not that there are any punters
at all, I'd expect). The noise, the harsh lighting, the constant need
to intercept and interrupt people in order to deliver the 5-second
pitch. (The experience for me improved vastly when we hit upon the
trick, for a change finding an advantage in our Swiss corporate
identity, of offering chocolate to our interlocutors: then if they
were totally uninterested in our product, they were up at least one
chocolate in the transaction.)

MWC was described in the weekend newspapers as
“less glamorous”.
Mind you, in the freesheet I read on the way to Gatwick Mark
Zuckerberg was described as a
“baby-faced bearer of evil”,
so clearly you can believe some things you read in the papers. I
haven't attended any of the presumably more “glamorous” trade shows (I
suppose they mean the likes of CeBIT and CES; certainly mass-media
coverage of MWC concentrates on handset announcements and other
consumer electronics rather than infrastructure). I wonder though if
the “glamour” is one of those dog-whistle words; the first two MWCs I
attended certainly had their share of blatant objectification of
women: and while I haven't personally experienced it as much in the
last two years I suspect that's because I only attend for the last
day, and mostly stay within the confines of our stand, and not because
the ethos has miraculously changed.

And, of course, I feel odd going to MWC, as I remain stubbornly
resistant to the mobile revolution. I don't own a smartphone; I
routinely forget to charge my dumbphone; I recognize that if I have an
addictive personality, my productivity will not improve if I have an
instant dopamine dispenser in my pocket. So along with the the
general misanthropy and introversion that goes with exhibiting at a
trade show with 80,000 attendees, there's the overall antipathy to the
whole show in the first place: why are all these people wasting so
much time and effort on shiny? I have made my peace with my segment
of the market: communications infrastructure may be “unglamorous” but
it is on balance probably a good thing; the rest of the industry,
including practically everything consumer-facing, leaves me not just
cold, but actively wondering how as a community we have got to this
position: prioritizing the matching of coloured jewels over anything
meaningful. (I recognize the irony, but at least
my addictions generally
don't involve the upload of my contacts database to the NSA's
command-and-control centre.)

The experience of the show itself was tolerable; my colleagues were
jealous of my freshness at the start of the day, and by the end of the
day I'd more or less turned the same shade of pale grey as everyone
else. I don't do well in loud, fluorescent-lit sensory-overload
environments. But I participated in some potential partner and
customer meetings, and of course helped in the post-show debriefing
session, and of course there's plenty of time at Barcelona airport to
finish this blog entry.